Rem Koolhaas – UNB Lecture – Brasilia, Distrito Federal

Part 1/3 – Q/A from UNB stundents to Rem Koolhaas. Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil; August 2011.
Shoot and Edition by Gabi Celani.

Part Two and Three of the lecture are also online.

South Africa: Housing Budget Increases to R28.1 Billion

South African Goverment (Pretoria) May, 22, 2013. allAfrica.com
Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale today tabled a R28.1 billion budget before Parliament saying the 2013/14 financial year allocation signified the government’s determination to eradicate the problem of homelessness in the country.

The 2013/14 budget allocation showed an increase of almost R3 billion when compared to what was given to the human settlements sector in the previous financial allocation. Minister Sexwale told Parliament that the government was committed to providing quality housing and building sustainable human settlements in the country as part of efforts to build a better and more inclusive society than that created under apartheid.

Quoting from the National Development Plan, he said inefficiencies and inequalities in South Africa’s settlement patterns were deeply entrenched and “bold measures are needed to reshape them.”

He added that the 2013/14 budget was important as it contributed to the total economic development of the country.

“Our budget should be seen as a catalyst in this process including job creation through our twin empowerment and construction programmes of Women and Youth Builds.

“Incrementally throughout our term, the budget has been earmarked primarily to address the poorest of the poor. In continuing to do so, let there be no doubt that our quest is not to be patted on the back for chasing numbers at the cost of quality,” he said.

Read more: http://allafrica.com/stories/201305231153.html

Park Life: Occupy Istanbul?

• by: Jussi Parikka

It was summed up in a tweet: this could be the Turkish Spring. The person was referring to a CNNturk broadcast, which finally had picked up the story of the past days of occupation of the Gezi park in Istanbul and the following police violence. A peaceful protest turned into widely circulating images of tear gas, facial injuries, and a range of police measures that anyone seeing the pictures could not see as proportionate, despite some government officials trying to dismiss the events. Some tweeters escorted their images of tear gas filled Taksim with a reminder: “this is not Middle East, this is Istanbul”.

The occupations had to do with a tactical colonialisation of both hashtag space and real lived urban space. The fit to purpose and inevitable hashtags had already paved the way on Twitter: #Occupygezi and #Occupytaksim signalled the connection to the widely known occupation of the Zuccotti Park in New York that spread as model for global reappropriations: occupation of public streets as a form of reclaiming the commons. Such occupations were never really only about that particular space, but also more abstract but as real features: protests against the logic of financial capitalism and their relation to the securitization of public space.

Read more

Jussi Parikka – Media Archaeology

Jussi Parrika is the director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) institute. His lecture Practicing Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation and Creation focuses on some ideas and examples from media archaeological art practice.

By visiting projects by prominent artists from Zoe Beloff to Paul Demarinis, as well as some more recent names, he aims to elaborate some ideas of how such media archaeological art is able to address questions of the “material”, temporality and nature. As such, the projects are themselves excellent articulations of some of the challenges media archaeology faces in terms of developing itself as an innovative approach to digital culture – practically and theoretically.

From: http://medea.mah.se/2011/05/jussi-parikka-on-media-archaeology/